Best way to remember the order is to remember the order
for NOT matching, ie !~
You never have a NOT exclamation point which is not at
the start of the operator. Of that you can be sure.
So, the matching operator must be =~ rather than ~=
Comment on Re: regexp operator -- same mistake over and over again
Yes, this worked for me too. The order seemed completely unnatural when I was first learning Perl but I sort of told myself that ~ is the regex binding operator and the = or ! is a modifier that indicates whether the binding is to be construed as an affirmative or negative one. Pretty kludgy but became second nature soon enough.